Cover story

The volume titled The Changing Role of the Journalist in American Sound Film reviews the 90 years of American sound film and, with the aim of completeness, examines the changing role of the journalist and the development of the image of the journalist. The research covered several hundred sound films, led by the film that lends the book its title, which fundamentally shaped the image of the journalist and determined the depiction of journalists in motion pictures for decades. The journalist has always been a popular character in motion pictures, and although the journalistic film is not an independent genre, but a theme whose popularity cannot be compared to, for example, the western or the musical, journalists have nevertheless been regular characters in the history of American motion pictures from the very beginning of film production. Based on the several hundred completed feature films, the press worker has become a recognizable, iconic figure of studio films. During the film history adventure of Címlapsztori, we can follow the process of how the emergence of television in the 1950s stirred up the stagnant waters of press films, and then the commercialization of TV irrevocably impacted the motion pictures of the 1980s and 1990s. The emergence of the internet at the turn of the millennium and its incredibly rapid spread introduced a new type of journalist and journalism into film as well.